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The quality that touches me most deeply in Tristan is the evidence of honesty and sincerity in a man who was treated by his enemies as a charlatan that used superficial and grossly material means to arrest and amaze the public eye.  What drama is more sober or more disdainful of exterior effect than Tristan?  Its restraint is almost carried to excess.  Wagner rejected any picturesque episode in it that was irrelevant to his subject.  The man who carried all Nature in his imagination, who at his will made the storms of the Walkuere rage, or the soft light of Good Friday shine, would not even depict a bit of the sea round the vessel in the first act.  Believe me, that must have been a sacrifice, though he wished it so.  It pleased him to enclose this terrible drama within the four walls of a chamber of tragedy.  There are hardly any choruses; there is nothing to distract one’s attention from the mystery of human souls; there are only two real parts—­those of the lovers; and if there is a third, it belongs to Destiny, into whose hands the victims are delivered.  What a fine seriousness there is in this love play.  Its passion remains sombre and stern; there is no laughter in it, only a belief which is almost religious, more religious perhaps in its sincerity than that of Parsifal.

It is a lesson for dramatists to see a man suppressing all frivolous trifling and empty episodes in order to concentrate his subject entirely on the inner life of two living souls.  In that Wagner is our master, a better, stronger, and more profitable master to follow, in spite of his mistakes, than all the other literary and dramatic authors of his time.

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I see that criticism has filled a larger place in these notes than I meant it to do.  But in spite of that, I love Tristan; for me and for others of my time it has long been an intoxicating draught.  And it has never lost anything of its grandeur; the years have left its beauty untouched, and it is for me the highest point of art reached by anyone since Beethoven’s death.

But as I was listening to it the other evening I could not help thinking:  Ah, Wagner, you will one day go too, and join Gluck and Bach and Monteverde and Palestrina and all the great souls whose names still live among men, but whose thoughts are only felt by a handful of the initiated, who try in vain to revive the past.  You, also, are already of the past, though you were the steady light of our youth, the strong source of life and death, of desire and renouncement, whence we drew our moral force and our power of resistance against the world.  And the world, ever greedy for new sensations, goes on its way amid the unceasing ebb and flow of its desires.  Already its thoughts have changed, and new musicians are making new songs for the future.  But it is the voice of a century of tempest that passes with you.